The Thursday Night Deaths

"For several months, our nurses have been baffled to find a dead
patient in the same bed every Friday morning" a spokeswoman for the
Pelonomi Hospital (Free State, South Africa) told reporters. "There was
no apparent cause for any of the deaths, and extensive checks on the
air conditioning system, and a search for possible bacterial infection,
failed to reveal any clues." "However, further inquiries have now
revealed the cause of these deaths.

It seems that every Friday morning a cleaner would enter the ward,
remove the plug that powered the patient's life support system, plug
her floor polisher into the vacant socket, then go about her business.
When she had finished her chores, she would plug the life support
machine back in and leave, unaware that the patient was now dead. She
could not, after all, hear the screams and eventual death rattle over
the whirring of her polisher.

"We are sorry, and have sent a strong letter to the cleaner in
question.  Further, the Free State Health and Welfare Department is
arranging for an electrician to fit an extra socket, so there should be
no repetition of this incident. The enquiry is now closed."


from (Cape Times, 6/13/96)
BTW, the headline of the newspaper story was, "Cleaner Polishes Off
Patients."